Sarah Brightman's hot gossip days are over

The world's best-selling soprano, Sarah Brightman, has been divorced twice, endured painful IVF and had to move to America to rebuild her life. She's quite a trooper, says Olga Craig

Sarah Brightman looks half her 48-years after a dramatic makeover for the cover of her new album.Photo: SCOPE FEATURES

By Olga Craig

10:06PM GMT 29 Nov 2008

Sarah Brightman struts on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York, draped head to toe in antique lace – rather like a latter-day Miss Haversham with attitude. As the music soars, she strips off the layers and veils to reveal thigh-high, silver glitter boots and a matching sparkly miniskirt. A-ha! Hold on a moment. Rewind. Haven't we seen something like this before?

The following day, Brightman, now demurely dressed in a little black shift and matching cardi (albeit vamped up a notch with over-the-knee black platform boots), laughs uproariously. "I know, I know, it's all a bit Starship Trooper," she giggles.

It was in 1978 that Brightman shimmied onto our television screens through a cloud of dry ice, dressed in a skin-tight silver catsuit and glitter platform boots, belting out I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper in that astonishing, soaring soprano voice. Now, here she is, three decades later, launching her first world tour in four years, in eerily similar attire. "Pure co-incidence," she assures me. "I'm a very different person."

And, no, Brightman isn't in the least nostalgic for those Starship days. Not long ago, a friend offered to take one of her cars for a service. Buried under a blanket in the boot, he found that self-same, though now slightly mouldy, silver siren suit from when she fronted the saucy dance troupe Hot Gossip. Do you want to keep it, he asked? "It was my sparkly Mary Quant outfit," Brightman says. "I'd forgotten I still had it. No, I told him, you can dump it now.

"It may have looked fabulous but those were the days of rather cheap, coarse material. The truth was it itched like crazy. All the time I was on camera, I was dying to scratch," she whispers conspiratorially.

In the intervening years, Brightman has sold more than 26 million albums and two million DVDs in 34 countries, with a musical style that fuses opera, pop and jazz. She still packs stadiums, and for several years running was the highest-selling British artist in the US, shifting more records than Elton John or the Rolling Stones.

And though she doesn't hanker after her Hot Gossip days, she has a healthy respect for the openings it offered. Tomorrow, she releases her 12th solo album, A Winter Symphony, a collection of festive classics that includes In The Bleak Midwinter, Silent Night and – somewhat questionably – Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day.

During a career spanning more than 30 years, she has married and divorced twice, the second time to Britain's most successful composer and Brightman's one-time mentor, Andrew Lloyd Webber. After he left his first wife Sarah Hugill in 1983, Brightman became hot gossip herself as the poison pens of the tabloids branded her a home-breaker.

The fallout from their divorce in 1991 effectively ended her UK stage career – so she relaunched herself in the States on the back of a stint in Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love on Broadway. Later, once she had found success on her own, Brightman offered to return her ex-husband's multi-million-pound divorce settlement. He told her to keep it as she had earned it.

While Brightman, now 48, can still pack 'em in in the States – her new world tour involves holographic sets, and requires her to change costume on stage, sing on top of a pile of plush mattresses, and perch on a precariously high swing – she can't quite pull it off in her homeland. She insists that doesn't worry her, that she sees the world as a global village.

But one suspects that the main problem is that, to the British, Brightman is forever frozen in a timewarp: she remains that fabulous singer who married the rich bloke.

"Possibly," she says after a brief pause. "But for all that, it was a painful time. The end of a marriage always is. Our time together was a very positive and creative phase for me. With hindsight, moving to America afterwards was a good thing. I started again and won success in a country where I was an unknown.

"On a personal level, though, I had to practically rebuild myself," she says, stretching out on the sofa and gazing out at the panoramic view of the New York skyline. Her apartment, all shiny stainless steel kitchen and cream carpets (upon which one must tread bare-footed) is smart and so tidy, the singer checked herself into a hotel the night before so that it would perfect for the photoshoot. Perfect, that is, except for the blood red flowers she ordered and which, she reveals fretfully, have not arrived. This is not a lady accustomed to glitches. She travels with a 50-strong entourage and likes to control everything.

Brightman had been out of work for a year after Hot Gossip before Lloyd Webber spotted her at an audition for Cats in 1981. He hired her, and the pair married three years later. He went on to cast her in several musicals, including Song and Dance, and wrote the lead role of The Phantom of the Opera for her.

After their divorce, Brightman had a love affair with the producer Frank Peterson that lasted several years. Then in her mid-thirties, Brightman's biological clock had begun to tick like crazy. After two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she decided to have fertility treatment. Four rounds of IVF later, she accepted that she would never be a mother.

"It was difficult. The longing to be a mother is a natural thing. But before I went down that road I decided when the cut-off point would be," she explains. "I knew that if I hadn't become pregnant by the fourth time then I would simply have to accept that. It was sad, but one of those things."

She was less prepared, however, for how physically gruelling the treatment was. "It's tough, very tough," she admits. "But it was really important to me to know that I'd given it my best shot. It's the way I approach everything. I need to try my best. That way, if it doesn't work out, I can accept it. There has been no 'if onlys' for me. I'm not a great believer in fate, but sometimes things are not meant to be."

After her relationship with Peterson ended, he remained her record producer. For the past two years, she has been dating Louis Oberlander, 41, a Bulgarian music studio technician, whom she met through work. Though Brightman found his company engaging, she was still surprised when he asked her to the cinema. "I went and, well, I realised that he really, really liked me," she says coyly. "He was used to seeing me in my old jeans at work, with no make-up. So he'd seen me looking good and looking bad. And because of work, there is a lot of space in the relationship. So every time we meet up, it's like a mini honeymoon."

Is, I wonder, the huge, pear-shaped diamond on her left hand, an engagement ring? "Oh no," she says nonchalantly. "I've had that for ages." Two divorces, one suspects, may have made her rather wary of another commitment. "No," she says emphatically. "it's not that. It's not about commitment, it's about not expecting. I don't have expectations. I've learned to just enjoy the moment. Take things as they come."

As she talks, Oberlander emerges from the bedroom, tall and rangy and extremely handsome. His sapphire blue eyes are truly startling. "Everyone comments on them," she says, kissing him on the cheek and waving him off. "He's used to it."

The ageing process, she insists, worries her not a jot. "I've had a bit of Botox, and things like that, but surgery? No." For all that she looks amazingly youthful. The jawline, perhaps, is a little less firm. But Brightman could still pass for a woman in her thirties. Two months ago, the tabloids published what they thought was a new picture of her in which her gothic black curls had given way to a sleek cap of blonde hair. Was it, they mused, a make-over?

Brightman giggles. "Actually, it was a shot left over from my previous album. I had blonde highlights put in especially – and I have to say I loved them. But no, I didn't go out like that so I have no idea whether blondes have more fun. Nor whether gentlemen prefer blondes."

Though she will be performing over New Year she is hoping to take time off over Christmas. "We want to get away, somewhere snowy, for a break," she says. Then, in January, she and her five siblings have planned a 70th birthday party for their mother.

"She's a fabulous woman, a warm, loving mother. She is so proud of all of us. It's our opportunity to throw a party for her, our family and all the friends who have been important to her in her life – and a chance to see all the old faces we haven't seen for years. A chance for us all to get together as a family.